Normalcy has returned, now that Stampede and World Cup Football had their last day yesterday, Stampede for a year and the World cup for four. However, the soccer was exciting to watch, with the Dutch team being my favourite mainly because of their playing style, with likable Robben in the lead.

Last Friday I brought my web postings up to date with the last daily entry of the week, closing off a set of five writings. However, there will be more related material to come in the next few days.

On Saturday I finally met up with John who had been quite busy all week. He let me know that his mother is recuperating nicely from last winter’s broken ankle. Annie was all absorbed in her games, so we barely exchanges a greeting. In the coming week I’ll be fairly busy with social visits, with two each on two separate days. And then there is some looking and shopping to be done as well.

Besides my visit to my Palliser friends yesterday, I also met with Elisabeth in the evening, who treated me to a Gelato on 17th Ave SW and showed me the place where her son now lives. Right now I have all the windows wide open to let the cool air flow in and through, but it is becoming time to let the blinds down as the sun is getting higher at 9:00am.

This past weekend I mulled over several ideas that complement the ideas I wrote about last week. At times I am tempted to write over the weekend in such cases, but always resisted it. This, because it is my experience that new ideas need a certain gestation time and opportunity to form out properly. When you write too early the thought process gets arrested, while if you wait too long the new ideas sail of into the blue yonder – the unconscious. Hence, now is the time.

There are two ideas I want to expand on, one is that we forge and describe our own concepts and second that existence is continuous alternating between two states. It could be that a third idea emerges between these two, but we will start with two.

The first idea, that we forge and describe our own concepts is an old one with me, but one I never have expressed before. It flows from the observation that humans over time developed language, words and script and that today too, this process of concept formation and naming with words is ongoing.

Let me take the word mountain as an example, since I live within sight of the Rockies, but you might take creek or forest just as well. Staying with the mountain, it has end to it at the top, but where does the mountain stop at its base before becoming just earth. Creek and forest offer similar challenges, yet we quite effectively use these names for these concepts in everyday life.

There must have been a time when such a named concept first came into use and we humans began from early on, with populating the world in which we lived with names and descriptions. Even today, there are some human traditions in which a mountain or a river – India’s Ganges River – is worshiped.

I call this an ordering process that assists us in framing our daily experience and am convinced that this is a process reaching back to the earliest beginnings of humankind. In this process the powers of nature, storm, lightning, and thunder also received their names. Many human traditions have ceremonies and rituals to influence such powers and possibly mitigate their destructive effects.

This is the type of behaviour that we humans have acquired when dealing with boundary situations, that is situations where we run out of known options and remedies. Times of war are another example of this boundary behaviour so to speak.

Just consider the effect of the New York World Trade center destruction of 2001 and the difficulty of placing this event in our framework.

You may ask whether such ceremonies are effective in an objective sense and the answer maybe ‘not very likely’. However, there can be no doubt that such ceremonies help in framing the events concerned into the world order and that without that framing, the events would become disruptive of attention to other necessary tasks. Just consider the effect of the New York World Trade center destruction of 2001 and the difficulty of placing this event in our framework.

What we have then, is a very complex system of concept formation and naming that we humans developed to order our world and frame our experience within it. A framework that developed with time all by means of ideas that humans discovered as they lived and interacted with their world.

It is important in this regard to note that the religions, such as we now call the old societal systems, played a central role in this development and continue to do so today in their various ways.

In conclusion we can say then that humankind lives in a world of its own description and this means that each word and concept is the outcome of human experience lending it value, significance and effectiveness. This is true for all concepts be they religious, scientific, poetic or colloquial in nature.

The question then arises as to whether all these words name something that is real or out there as some say, independent of my say so. We know the moon is out there, as well as the river and the mountain, but still they are our human way of describing our world and it remains our human defined order and framework, which only includes a small part of all that exists.
<10:12am and with editing plus phone call, 11:32am~